A small business homepage has exactly one job, and most of them are busy doing a different one. The job is helping a stranger who has never heard of you work out, quickly, whether you do the thing they need, and then take one specific next step. Explaining your company runs a distant second. So the real question behind what to put on a small business homepage is an ordering question: what does that stranger need to see first, second, and third?
Think about how you use other people’s websites. You land, you scan, you decide. Almost nobody reads one top to bottom. Which puts the font and the shade of blue behind a duller question: does the first screenful say what you do and who for?
Below is the section stack we build into every launch site, with what each one has to prove. We publish it because the order isn’t the secret. Getting it all right at once is.
What goes above the fold?
Four things. What you do, who it’s for, where you do it, and one action. One sentence, one button. Fill in the blank out loud, the way you’d answer at a cookout:
We do [service] for [type of customer] in [place].
“Kitchen and bath remodels for homeowners in Dublin, Hilliard and Upper Arlington.” “Same-day garage door repair across Franklin County.” Nothing clever about either. Clear beats clever, because clever makes the reader do work and nobody showed up wanting homework.
Then the action. Singular. And a photo of the real thing: your crew, your shop, your finished work. Not five people in business casual pointing at a laptop. Stock reads as “we had nothing real to show you.”
What to put on a small business homepage, in order
Eight sections, each answering a question a stranger is silently asking:
| # | Section | The question it has to answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hero | Do you do the thing I need, near me? |
| 2 | Proof strip | Are you real, and has anyone else risked it? |
| 3 | Services | Which of my specific problems do you handle? |
| 4 | How you work | What happens after I call, and how badly can this go? |
| 5 | Work | Show me you’ve done this before. |
| 6 | Reviews | Do people like me end up happy? |
| 7 | Service area | Do you actually come to my town? |
| 8 | Close | Fine. What do I do now? |
Four of those need explaining.
The proof strip is the quiet band right under the hero. Star rating and review count, years in business, licensed and insured, client logos if you sell to businesses. One line, no fanfare. It kills the “is this a real company” question before it forms.
Services should be three to six items, each with one plain sentence of scope, and each linking to its own page. A service that links nowhere is just a poster on the wall. Our services page is a working reference.
How you work is the section we most often find missing when we rebuild a site, and it removes more hesitation than another paragraph about your values. Three steps, plainly named: what happens when they contact you, what happens next, what happens at the end. Price isn’t always what stalls people. Often they stall because they can’t picture the part after the call.
Service area means named towns. Westerville, Grove City, Gahanna, Reynoldsburg. Not “the Central Ohio area,” which tells a person in Pickerington nothing.
Now, that list reads like a Saturday. It isn’t. Every section is a pile of small decisions – what the proof strip says when you have eleven reviews instead of two hundred, how the hero crops on a phone, whether the form actually delivers – none hard alone, all needing to be right at once. If your evenings are already spoken for, that’s not you falling behind. That’s the honest math on handing it off, and it’s what our small business websites are: fixed scope, fixed price, you bring the facts and we make the forty small calls.
What counts as proof, and what’s just decoration?
Proof is anything a stranger could go verify. Decoration is anything you wrote about yourself. “Family owned since 2004” is proof. “We pride ourselves on quality workmanship” is decoration, because no competitor has ever claimed the opposite. It’s wallpaper.
- Reviews with a name attached. Full name is best, first name and last initial is fine. Anonymous glowing quotes read as invented.
- Photos of your own work. Slightly imperfect shots of real jobs beat beautiful stock. The imperfection is the credential. (Ours are in the portfolio.)
- Numbers you actually track. If you know how many installs you did last year, say it. If you’re guessing, leave it out.
- Logos you have permission to use. Nobody is impressed by a badge from a directory they’ve never heard of.
Should you put prices on your homepage?
If you can state an honest floor, yes. We do. A published number lets wrong-fit people rule themselves out before anyone books a call.
Our launch website is $2,400 flat. Booking sites start at $5,500, online stores at $8,500, and maintenance is $300, $650, or from $5,000 a month depending on how much you want us doing. Those numbers sit on our pricing page, calculator and all, with the reasoning in how much a small business website costs.
A $900 budget and a $9,000 budget both fill out “contact us for a custom quote,” and you spend the same hour on both calls. A floor saves you that hour. It also makes you quotable: someone can repeat “their sites start at $2,400” to their business partner. Nobody repeats “call them to find out.”
If your pricing genuinely varies, publish a starting-at figure plus the two or three things that move it. “It depends” answers nothing.
Should the main button say “Call” or “Request a Quote”?
Match it to how urgent the problem is. Urgent means call. Planned means form.
Burst pipe, dead furnace, locked out: the visitor wants a human right now, and a five-field form is an obstacle course. Make the phone number the button, tap-to-call. Kitchen remodel, new website, wedding photography: nobody calls a stranger at 9pm to start a months-long project, so a form wins.
Either way, pick one primary action and repeat it down the page. Two buttons of equal weight is a question you’re asking the visitor to answer for you. And a form is only as good as the notification behind it, so go submit a test through your own right now. A silently broken contact form looks like a slow month.
What should you delete from your homepage today?
- The rotating slider. It’s what happens when nobody could agree on the most important message, so the site shows the losing one half the time. Nobody waits for slide three.
- “Welcome to our website.” It spends your most valuable line of copy telling people something they already know. They arrived on purpose.
- The stock handshake photo. Also the stock team meeting, and the skyline. One grainy shot of your actual truck in an actual driveway beats the whole stock library.
- The services grid where nothing links. Six icons, six headings, six dead ends. You built a menu and locked the kitchen.
What if you already tried this with AI and it came out wrong?
Then you found the gap, and it’s worth naming, because it isn’t a you problem. AI is genuinely good at drafts. Describe your business and you get back a hero, a services grid, headings, copy that reads fine at a glance. That’s real. It’s also a starting point, not a finished business asset, and that distance is most of the job.
Look back at the proof list. Your review count, the towns you drive to, a photo of your crew on a real property, what happens after someone calls. A model has none of that, so it writes the confident version of nothing: “quality workmanship,” “serving the Central Ohio area,” a handshake. Decoration, generated fluently, which is exactly what a stranger discounts.
Then there’s the part you already saw. It looked right in the preview and wrong on your phone. Spacing that’s almost consistent. Type that’s 15px in one section and 17px in the next. A form that submits and goes nowhere. That’s not a prompt you got wrong. It’s craft, and craft doesn’t come out of a text box.
We use these tools too, daily, inside a process where a person is accountable for the result. That’s the part worth paying for. Not better prompts. The last mile: the crop at every breakpoint, the form notification that actually arrives, someone whose job it is to fix things when they break eight months from now. New to all this? Short version: AI is a tool we hold, not a replacement for someone holding it.
(No customers yet, still testing whether the idea has legs? A rough DIY page is a fine placeholder. The day you spend real money pointing people at it, it costs more than it saves. That’s the day to send us the link.)
What does this look like on a 390px phone?
Most of your visitors are probably on a phone; your analytics will confirm it in a minute. Design that layout first instead of squishing the desktop one down at the end.
- Logo, primary action, and menu in the header. On a service business the phone number belongs right there as a real tap-to-call link, not three taps deep in a hamburger. A number people hunt for is a number nobody dials.
- Headline plus button in the first screenful. You get one sentence and one action before the fold, so order the markup that way instead of leading with a giant image.
- Check the hero crop yourself. A wide hero narrowed to phone width crops from the sides, which is how your finished patio becomes a close-up of a downspout.
Small business homepage FAQ
How long should a small business homepage be?
Long enough to get through the eight sections and no longer. Length isn’t the problem. Repetition is. A page where every section proves something new reads fast. A short page that says “quality service you can trust” three ways feels endless.
Do I need an “about us” section on the homepage?
A short one, about the reader’s risk rather than your history. Two or three sentences on who you are and why you’re safe to hire, then a link to the full about page. Your founding story is interesting to a few visitors, none of whom are reading it in the first screenful.
How often should the homepage change?
Review it twice a year, and update it the day anything factual changes: hours, service area, prices, staff, phone number. The homepage goes stale quietly, because it’s the one page nobody is assigned to. That’s part of what a maintenance plan covers, along with the unglamorous half: updates, backups, security, someone watching whether the site is up. If money gets tight, cut somewhere else. Stale prices cost you a little. An unpatched site that gets hit costs you the phone number your customers have called for ten years.
So what do you do with this?
Open your homepage on your phone and read only what’s visible before you scroll. If a stranger couldn’t tell what you do, who you do it for, and where, now you know.
Knowing is the easy half, and I won’t pretend the other half is an afternoon. Run the numbers on our pricing calculator, or just send us your current homepage plus what your customers actually call you about. We’ll tell you which of the eight sections you’re missing, in order, and what it costs to build them right. Then you get your evenings back, and a stranger finally knows what you do.